New UT Report: Climate Litigation and the Campaign to Influence the Judiciary

By Michael Toth

Thousands of judges across the nation have sat through climate-science training and received literature from trusted federal bodies and scientific institutes. Those judges had every right to expect that the information they received was neutral, objective, settled science. They were mistaken.

My latest research paper presents the first full taxonomy of a coordinated, multi-year campaign designed to shape how the American judiciary understands climate litigation. It documents how the Environmental Law Institute (ELI) built an extensive educational apparatus to train judges on climate issues—in the words of one session attendee— “from what would effectively be the plaintiff’s side.”

ELI routinely portrays itself as a neutral arbiter committed to “insightful and impartial analysis.” In 2018, it launched the Climate Judiciary Project (CJP) to provide judges with “authoritative, objective, and trusted education on climate science.” Yet, as my report details, CJP shares multiple donors and advisors with Sher Edling LLP, the San Francisco-based law firm behind more than two dozen climate lawsuits against energy companies. 

The training methodology CJP deployed is striking. The goal was not merely to educate judges about complex areas of law and science, but to encourage them to develop and execute their own climate “action plans.” Slide presentations and emails obtained between ELI staff and attendees show judges being coached on how to spread that influence to colleagues on the bench. Attendance forms show judges from California, Delaware, Illinois, Hawaii, Maryland, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Washington, and even Puerto Rico attended CJP trainings—all jurisdictions with active climate suits. 

CJP’s reach extended to established judicial and scientific gatekeepers. A 2020 CJP curriculum draft identified the Federal Judicial Center’s (FJC) Reference Manual on Scientific Evidence and the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) Extreme Weather Attribution Report as publications judges could rely upon. Both would go on to bear the project’s fingerprints.

Released in 2025, the Fourth Edition of the Reference Manual included a climate change chapter for the first time. That section was later revealed to have lifted material heavily from the prior writings of a lawyer representing climate plaintiffs, Sher Edling’s Michael Burger. The chapters’ listed authors, moreover, were both CJP presenters and the manual shared some of the same funders as the foundations bankrolling the public-nuisance suits targeting the energy sector. Following the public outcry over these conflicts of interest, the FJC and NAS took the unprecedented step of removing the climate chapter entirely.

That controversy, however, did not stop NAS, which initially pushed back against criticism of the manual, from releasing the Extreme Weather Attribution Report. The committee behind the report was similarly one-sided in favor of climate plaintiffs, which may explain why the 253-page document lays out theories for attributing the effects of climate change to specific energy producers without seriously dealing with the inconvenient fact that greenhouse gas emissions are largely driven by global demand for energy. 

When private interest groups slip past the adversarial process to tilt the scales on contested issues, the rule of law is compromised. The findings in my report demonstrate an urgent need for updated disclosure requirements surrounding judicial education programs. Trusted institutional gatekeepers like the Federal Judicial Center must institute rigorous vetting mechanisms to restore their credibility. Ultimately, federal and state officials should investigate how ELI and CJP gained such unchecked access over the bench and establish strict guardrails to ensure this cannot happen again.

Michael Toth is director of research at the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas.

This article was originally published by RealClearEnergy and made available via RealClearWire.